Quotes from Louise Erdrich

It was Pollux, chomping into an apple that he'd lightly peppered. That's how he ate apples. Held the pepper tin in one hand so he could get a jolt in every bite.

Whatever his belief, Father Damien had acted on the fundamental dictates of a great love. Sacrifice had been his rule. He'd put others above himself and lived in the abyss of doubt rather than forsake those in need. Was doubt when coupled with devotion a greater virtue than simple faith?

this knowledge—like love, sex, or having or not having a baby—has nothing to do with government.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other. Throw it in the garbage and it springs up clean. Try to root it out and it only flourishes. Love is a weed, a dandelion that you poison from your heart. The taproots wait. The seeds blow off, ticklish, into a part of the yard you didn't spray. And one day, though you worked, though you prodded out each spiky leaf, you lift your eyes and dozens of fat golden faces bob in the grass.

Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai

from Mooshum to Sonja, back and forth. They wouldn't look at each other. I'm gonna ask you to leave in a nice way, Joe.

They're all the same-- the cop, the criminal, the defense, the prosecutor-- they all share a fundamental belief in the malleability of truth

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved," said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. "The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live." *

For real food our people had traveled off reservation twenty miles or more to put our money in the pockets of store clerks who watched us with suspicion and took our money with contempt.

He had learned one truth in his work—there was no changing the true arrangement of a human heart. One dealt with the earthly exigencies.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writers must have a place where she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with. Louise Erdrich

I found I could not read just any book. It had gotten so I could see through books – the little ruses, the hooks, the setup in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last page the author could whisk out the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite character. I needed the writing to have a certain mineral density. It had to feel naturally meant, but not cynically contrived. I grew to dislike manipulations.

jiggered-together adaptations.

She just said nothing. Nothing. She let the silence between them fill the air. Unlike other people, Omakayas had noticed, silence did not make Old Tallow uncomfortable. Now the warrior lady simply stood and smoked her pipe. The smoke drifted serenely in wavering fangs from each corner of her mouth. She was thinking.

He was upset when pious land-grabbers declared that the Will of God was somehow involved in so effectively destroying Indians who squatted in the path of progress. Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture. Sometimes, even now, I look on the married girls the way a wild dog might look through the window at tame ones, envying the regularity of their lives but also despising the low pleasure they get from the master's touch.

Fidelis was not a religious man, except when it came to his knives.

Blue glass bottles on windowsills keep devils out, and so on.

she has a tattooed hawk, diving down to chase blue swallows to her wrist. She is saving money to have the blue swallows fly up her right arm to feed their nestlings at the top of that shoulder. That way when she clasps her hands she will wear a story of escape.

Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.

I write first drafts by hand. Never do I open an umbrella inside the house. I don't predict wins or losses. I used to stand on a certain piece of rug if my brothers and husband were watching football and their team got in trouble - but now the luck went out of that rug. If a circle is involved, I try to go clockwise.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.

...whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom